I changed the order for this one. “Qongqothwane” comes from an oral tradition, so I listened to Miriam Makeba before looking at a translation.
First, listen
The core refrain
There are several versions of the words. This is the short one I started with:
Igqirha lendlela nguqongqothwane,
Igqirha lendlela nguqongqothwane.
Ebeqabel’ egqith’ apha,
uqongqothwane.
Ebeqabel’ egqith’ apha,
uqongqothwane.
A simple, naive translation
The diviner of the road is the knocking beetle,
The diviner of the road is the knocking beetle.
It climbed and passed this way,
the knocking beetle.
It climbed and passed this way,
the knocking beetle.
I haven’t included an English pronunciation guide. The clicks are consonants in isiXhosa, not decorative sounds that English spelling can represent properly. For this poem, Makeba is the pronunciation guide.
My first response
It is a simple set of lines and, if it references something deeper, I need a lot more context to make sense of it.
What I learned
The context does matter here. “Qongqothwane” is a traditional isiXhosa wedding song. An igqirha is a traditional healer or diviner. The uqongqothwane is the knocking beetle.
The bare translation leaves out the associations that give those lines their weight. A diviner may guide the rites around a marriage. In Xhosa oral tradition, the knocking beetle is said to show lost children the way home. Its knocking is also how it attracts a mate. That makes the comparison much easier for me to follow. The beetle shows the road home, while the diviner guides a couple towards a new life together.
Makeba took the song to audiences around the world and included it on her first American studio album in 1960. She explained that English speakers called it “The Click Song” because they could not pronounce “Qongqothwane.” In later performances she became more pointed about that name. The clicks were part of her language, not noises or vocal effects.
That is not a minor distinction. Makeba was not demonstrating an unusual sound for an international audience. She was singing in isiXhosa and insisting that people hear it as a language during apartheid, when language itself was used as a form of control.
Listening again
It is easy for me to be mesmerized by the clicks in the song, and too easy for that to distract me from the rest of the performance. Makeba spoke up against exactly that way of hearing it. Knowing this hasn’t made the clicks less mesmerizing, but it has made me more conscious of what I may be missing.